You hear a lot of wining and crying the WOW PvP boards about how AV is unbalanced and how hord always win. Well, after the patch, everything looks good to me. Games are fast, fun, and there is honor everywhere.

I played a ton of games this weekend, and because I am a huge dork, I tracked my honor. Because I am a nice guy, I'll share the results. In the chart, any na is where I either forgot to record the info, or I got disconnected.

Starting Honor	Bonus Honor	HK	Win/Lose	Time
3730	271	5	W	30
4197	438	5	W	26
4953	418	6	W	30
5565	355	25	L	28
6213	627	0	W	12
6861	585	8	W	20
7478	na	na	na	na
7585	376	23	W	28
8198	167	0	L	30
8567	522	23	W	24
9207	376	104	L	55
10012	313	10	L	14
10501	543	7	W	15
11091	459	12	W	15
11770	543	7	W	19
12351	543	5	W	18
12919	355	11	W	18
13493	459	6	L	14
13979	376	11	W	36
na	438	12	L	17

Day 2

Starting Honor	Bonus Honor	HK	Win/Lose	Time
0	397	0	W	18
564	418	1	L	12
983	397	4	L	20
1401	418	13	W	20
2032	585	0	W	20
2689	418	21	W	20
3306	501	0	L	13
3850	355	9	W	17
4404	647	10	W	19
5115	564	2	L	20
6200	334	4	L	27
6603	438	5	L	13
na	512	10	W	20
na	585	9	W	22
8417	438	18	W	25

 

 

 

Honor in Alteric Vally is kicking this weekend like I have never seen. It is the perfect combination of two things: Blizzard releasing the patch that made AFK'ing in AV a lot harder, and Alteric Vally weekend giving double honor. Everyone wants to play AV this weekend, and that makes the que times under 1 minute and the honor retarded. I earned 15,000 honor in Alteric Vally yesterday alone. Check it out:

 

Most of the games were nice and fast, coming in at under 30 min. At best I was able to get 647 honor in 30 min. Average game was 543.

The new Alteric Vally is a different animal from the old style, the horde all play, and they are faster. Here are my 10 keys to the new game:

1. Just go offense. There really is no need for defense. Some people will always harrase, and that is fine.
2. Cap and hold the towers. Towers give you 40 honor each, and send an npc to fight for you. Having skipped most D, this is important.
3. Don't skip anything. A lot of people will shout to skip galv. You don't want to leave any honor on the table
4. Lead by example. A lot of people try and give orders at the start. I usually say what I am going to do and then ask if anyone will help me. Usually this is cap IB tower to start.
5. Ask individual people for help. If no one is willing to stay at IB tower and defend with me, I wisper someone close and ask them personally.
6. Report AFK. There is a new function to report people who are AFK. Use it! If you see them do a /target name. Get everyone to do this as well
7. Stick together. Some people want to try and ninja FW or the RH. This doesn't work anymore and costs more time than it helps. Stick together and you can roll any hord that come your way. Don't qq. Of someone isn't playing how you want, QQ in chat isn't going to help. Ask for help, or /ignore works great.
8. Distance. The new style AV is all about time and distance. Look at the map and see how far the Horde have to travel after a rez. Long is good. Avoid downtime rezzing and running.
9. Rez if you can! And offer to rez, especially by IB when you are starting out and have no GY
10. Again, hold the towers. I have not a lost a game where we burned down the towers. It gets you three things, honor, more NPC defense, and the horde wastes time trying to retake them.

Play this weekend, follow these guildlines, and the honor will pour in. Now, if you spend it or save it for season 3, that is your call!

I want to build off my Arbitrage post a little bit here by talking about supply and demand.

Everyone knows about supply and demand and anyone can extrapolate and use that knowledge on the AH to make World of Warcraft gold. But this thing that doesn't jump out at people, and that is very simple once you think about it, is the demand changes on the weekends. The demands for consumables goes up dramatically on the weekends. More people play, and they want to complete their quests or goals in the time they have.

So the simple lesson is sell only on the weekends. All the stuff you farm or gather or buy during the week, save and sell it on the weekends. You not only sell it at a higher price, but your chances of it selling increase. There are more people on, and they want that new sword NOW!

I really want to stress that point. It is not just that more people are on, thus driving up the price. It is that more people are on that cannot or do not play during the week. They want that sword/enchant/gem now, and they will over pay because they do not want to wait for the price to fall, this is their only time to play.

You can make money by buying during the week, and selling on the weekend.

Arbitrage is a hot term these days, and it applies to the World of Warcraft just as much as it does to the world at large.

Arbitrage in general means the difference in price betweeen markets. I used to makes tons of money by arbitrating dark iron ore. I would buy it on the AH 20 for 20g. But I could make a dark iron bar out that and sell the bar for 30-40g. That meant if I bought 80 iron ore for 80g, I could sell the bars for 240-320g. Sadlly, that buisness dried up, but I found a new one, disenchanting.

For example, illusion dust and dream dust are very expensive on my server right now. So, I go to thott and search for illusion dust and find that at around item lvl 57 the odds for illusion dust dropping are about even. If illusion dust is 2g on my server, I start bidding on any greens that are > lvl 57 and < 2g. When I win, I DE, and sell the illusion dust.

This is not "farming" exactly, but it is a great way to make money in World of Warcraft. This is literally money laying on the ground. And with ancient lichen in the dungons your going to run, you can kill two birds with one stone.

Then, when you are all nice and leveld up you can make sweeps while you wait for BG or Arena to pop. I sweep down south of Shat picking up Fel Weed and Terrorcones. A 20 stack of Terrorcone sells for about 20g on my server, and the felweed procs Mote of Life which is always nice.

If you have time for serious gathering, I go to Shadow Moon Valley. I fly into the Altar of Sha'tar and start gathering Terror Vine. It is usually empty in Shadow Moon Valley, esp. in the back corner.